Increasingly, computer systems have needed to protect themselves against unwanted objects. Such unwanted objects have taken on a variety of forms including, but not limited to spam within files, electronic messages (e-mails), etc. Traditionally, unwanted objects have been identified utilizing pattern matching techniques. For example, known unwanted words, phrases, and other content have been compared with objects to determine whether such objects are unwanted.
However, identifying unwanted objects in this manner has required that every potentially unwanted object (or component thereof) be predefined for utilization in the pattern matching. Furthermore, the predefined known unwanted objects have conventionally been limited to including only alphabetical characters, etc., thus preventing identification of unwanted objects that include types of characters other than alphabetical characters (e.g. symbols, etc.).
There is thus a need for addressing these and/or other issues associated with the prior art.